Introduction
Contemporary scholarship within environmental and sustainability education (ESE) argues that the unfolding ecological crisis of the Anthropocene calls for reimagining how education relates to the Earth and the more-than-human world (Cars & West, Reference Cars and West2014; Jickling & Sterling, Reference Jickling and Sterling2017; Paulsen et al., Reference Paulsen, Jagodzinski and Hawke2022; Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Reference Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2023; Ziethen & Paulsen, Reference Ziethen and Paulsen2025). Several authors contend that the crisis cannot be understood apart from wider social and epistemological conditions, including modernity’s human-centred orientation (Bhaskar et al., Reference Bhaskar, Høyer and Næss2012; Vetlesen, Reference Vetlesen2019) and what some describe as anthropocentric assumptions embedded in mainstream modern Western education (Blenkinsop et al., Reference Blenkinsop, Morse, Jickling, Paulsen, Jagodzinsk and Hawke2022; Blenkinsop & Wilhelmsson, Reference Blenkinsop and Wilhelmsson2024; Paulsen, Reference Paulsen, Kergel, Paulsen, Garsdal and Heidkamp-Kergel2022a; Pedersen, Reference Pedersen2021). Recent contributions further argue that dominant educational models contribute to ecological and social crises by reproducing hierarchical human–nature relations and narrowly instrumental understandings of knowledge and learning (Blenkinsop & Kuchta, Reference Blenkinsop and Kuchta2024; Paulsen et al., Reference Paulsen, Illeris and Reato2025).
While we recognise that these analyses represent particular strands within the field, we broadly follow their argument that modern educational traditions must be revisited if they are to respond meaningfully to contemporary ecological and societal challenges. Following this line of critique, this article revisits one such influential educational tradition: the modern critical-constructive Bildung (self-formation) tradition associated with the German thinkers Wilhelm von Humboldt and Wolfgang Klafki (Petersen et al., Reference Petersen, Brömssen, Jacobsen, Garsdal, Paulsen and Koefoed2022). We focus on this tradition for two main reasons. First, it remains highly influential, particularly in Northern European educational theory and practice, where it continues to shape curricular thinking, teacher professionalism, and democratic education in so-called Bildung countries (Eriksson, Reference Eriksson2019; Paulsen, Reference Paulsen, Kergel, Paulsen, Garsdal and Heidkamp-Kergel2022b), as well as parts of ESE research and practice, for example in action competence approaches (Lysgaard & Svensson, Reference Lysgaard, Bengtsson, Paulsen, Jagodzinski and Jagodzinski2022). Second, while this tradition is grounded in human-centred assumptions, it also contains conceptual resources that may support critical-reflective approaches to ESE. Kvamme (Reference Kvamme2021), for example, suggests that its emancipatory and democratic commitments make it a promising framework for addressing the challenges of the Anthropocene, provided its inherited anthropocentric assumptions are critically re-examined. We therefore explore how this tradition might be reimagined beyond such assumptions.
To do so, this theory-experimental article engages the Wild Pedagogies (WP) concept of Nature as Co-Teacher (Blenkinsop et al., Reference Blenkinsop, Morse, Jickling, Paulsen, Jagodzinsk and Hawke2022; Jickling et al., Reference Jickling, Blenkinsop, Timmerman and De Danann Sitka-Sage2018; Paulsen et al., Reference Paulsen, Wilhelmsson, Blenkinsop, Jickling and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2025) as a lens for reconsidering how education could support self–world relations in a more-than-human world. The concept is particularly relevant because it challenges assumptions that position nature merely as a context for human learning, instead inviting educators to consider how the living world itself may participate in and shape pedagogical relations. Moreover, within the WP literature the concept functions as a heuristic rather than a fixed framework (Blenkinsop et al., Reference Blenkinsop, Morse, Jickling, Paulsen, Jagodzinsk and Hawke2022). This flexibility makes it well-suited to our purpose: to explore how key contributions of the critical-constructive Bildung tradition might be reimagined if nature is no longer positioned as a passive backdrop but as an active partner in teaching and learning.
While Bildung is often discussed as a philosophical or theoretical concept, it is also a long-standing and living pedagogical tradition. With roots extending over more than eight centuries, Bildung continues to shape everyday educational language, institutional self-understandings, and formal educational aims in Germany, Scandinavia, and northern European DidaktikFootnote 1 traditions (Horlacher, Reference Horlacher2016; Kvamme, Reference Kvamme2021; Masschelein & Ricken, Reference Masschelein and Ricken2003, Reference Masschelein and Ricken2005; Taylor, Reference Taylor2017). In these contexts, Bildung is not confined to academic discourse but functions as a normative orientation for schooling and teaching. This is evident, for example, in Danish upper secondary education, where the overarching purpose of schooling is explicitly framed in terms of Bildung:
“The programmes shall have a Bildung perspective, emphasising students’ development of personal autonomy. Students must therefore learn to relate to their surroundings in a reflective and responsible manner, including fellow human beings, nature, the environment, climate, and society, as well as to their own development. The programmes must also develop students’ creative and innovative capacities and their critical judgement.” (Danish Parliament, Reference Parliament2025)
In this sense, Bildung operates as a pedagogical ideal that links teaching, self-formation, and responsibility towards the world. Conceptually, Bildung is also a historically rich and heterogeneous tradition. The term has been translated as self-cultivation (Bruford, Reference Bruford1975), self-formation (Sorkin, Reference Sorkin1983), and self-development (Tahirsylaj & Werler, Reference Tahirsylaj and Werler2021), and described as a ‘transformation of the relationship between self and world’ (Brinkmann, Reference Brinkmann2019) or as ‘keeping oneself open to what is other’ (Ekberg & Schwieler, Reference Ekberg and Schwieler2021). Broadly understood, Bildung concerns the cultivation of ways of knowing, being, sensing, and acting in relation to the world, linking personal transformation with cultural and democratic aspirations (Horlacher, Reference Horlacher2016; Taylor, Reference Taylor2017). A recent growing body of literature emphasises that Bildung has never been a static ideal but has repeatedly been reinterpreted in response to social, political, and historical change (Taylor, Reference Taylor2017, Reference Taylor and Strand2020). In the context of the ecological crisis, this interpretive openness has led scholars to argue that Bildung must revisit its inherited human–nature dualisms (Kvamme, Reference Kvamme2021; Brückner & Paulsen, Reference Brückner, Paulsen, Bhowmik and Papa2026).
Alongside these discussions about reinterpreting Bildung in light of ecological challenges, the emerging field of WP offers resources for such reorientation. WP scholars argue that modern educational practices often reinforce unsustainable ways of relating to the world and propose alternative pedagogical approaches grounded in relational, ecological, and posthumanist perspectives (Blenkinsop et al., Reference Blenkinsop, Morse, Jickling, Paulsen, Jagodzinsk and Hawke2022; Blenkinsop & Kuchta, Reference Blenkinsop and Kuchta2024; van Tol & Wals, Reference van Tol and Wals2025; van Tol, Reference van Tol2025). Recent contributions within the WP literature describe WP as part of a broader international effort to rethink educational purposes in light of ecological crisis, colonisation, and reconciliation (Paulsen et al., Reference Paulsen, Wilhelmsson, Blenkinsop, Jickling and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2025). While WP encompasses a wide range of ideas and practices, in this article we engage only one of its touchstones: the concept of Nature as Co-Teacher. We use this heuristic concept as a specific lens through which to reconsider the Humboldt–Klafki Bildung tradition. Our aim in this article is therefore twofold: first, to identify assumptions within the critical-constructive Humboldt–Klafki Bildung tradition that may be limiting from an environmental perspective, particularly assumptions about how human self–world relations could be understood in education; and second, to explore how this strand of Bildung might be reimagined through engagement with the concept of Nature as Co-Teacher. Across the three re-imaginations developed in the article, Nature as Co-Teacher functions as a lens for reworking these assumptions and for offering the critical-constructive Bildung tradition a renewed pedagogical grounding, in line with calls to rethink Bildung in light of contemporary ecological challenges (Kvamme, Reference Kvamme2021; Taylor, Reference Taylor and Strand2020). We do not understand nature here simply as a backdrop for human development, but as a potential pedagogical partner whose agency and presence prompt a reconsideration of educational relations. We frame this endeavour as a cross-cultural and intercultural reimagination (Garfield, Reference Garfield2002; Nelson, Reference Nelson2020), informed by reflections from an international WP research gathering in a Nordic context, which is described later in the article. The gathering was in itself accomplished with nature as Co-Teacher and even Co-Researcher, while also reflecting on the concept.
The article proceeds as follows. We first introduce and assess the Humboldt–Klafki Bildung tradition, highlighting both its critical potentials and its anthropocentric limitations. We then introduce the concept of Nature as Co-Teacher and further nuance it through collective reflections developed during the aforementioned research gathering. Finally, we discuss how these insights may support reimagining Bildung by reconceptualising relations between humans and the more-than-human world, while sustaining Bildung’s critical aspirations and considering what such reorientations might mean for education in times of ecological crisis.
The modern Humboldt-Klafki Bildung Tradition
The concept of Bildung has a long history that predates its modern educational usage. Etymologically, Bildung is linked to the notion of Bild (image) and to mediaeval translations of the Latin imāginātio, where it referred to processes of human movement toward unity with the divine (Koselleck, Reference Koselleck2007). The meaning of Bildung changed significantly with its secularisation in the late eighteenth century (Koselleck, Reference Koselleck2007; Paulsen, Reference Paulsen, Kergel, Paulsen, Garsdal and Heidkamp-Kergel2022b). Bildung was then reformulated as self-Bildung: a process not imposed from the outside but initiated through the individual’s own reflective engagement with the world (Gadamer, Reference Gadamer2003). This modern understanding rejected both external shaping and the idea of education as the mere unfolding of innate potentials. Instead, Bildung came to denote an open-ended process of self-realisation grounded in freedom, self-activity, and critical reflection (Larsen, Reference Larsen2014; Masschelein & Ricken, Reference Masschelein and Ricken2005).
At the same time, modern Bildung was never conceived as a purely individual project but as a dual concept linking individual self-development with broader cultural and societal formation. Thus, it was recognised that Bildung presupposes participation in shared traditions and relations with others and aims to contribute to humanity as a whole rather than to private self-cultivation alone (Klafki, 2001; Tahirsylaj & Werler, Reference Tahirsylaj and Werler2021). As both Humboldt and Klafki articulate Bildung as a reflective, critical, and socially oriented process, their work provides a coherent and widely recognised basis for examining how Bildung’s assumptions about human self–world relations might be reimagined in response to contemporary ecological challenges. Nevertheless, their combination of individual freedom and social responsibility remains situated within a predominantly human-centred horizon.
Humboldt’s vision of Bildung
Within the modern reformulation of Bildung, Wilhelm von Humboldt emerges as a key figure, offering the most influential articulation of Bildung as a lifelong process of self-development through engagement with the plurality of the world. His account conceptualises Bildung as an ongoing interplay between self and world, grounded in freedom and openness, and it has profoundly shaped later German and Nordic educational thought (Nordenbo, Reference Nordenbo2002). For this reason, Humboldt’s work provides a natural point of departure for us.
Building on the modern reformulation of Bildung, Humboldt developed the concept into a systematic account of human formation (Brinkmann, Reference Brinkmann2019; Miller, Reference Miller2021; Nordenbo, Reference Nordenbo2002; Paulsen, Reference Paulsen, Kergel, Paulsen, Garsdal and Heidkamp-Kergel2022b; Straume, Reference Straume2013). Humboldt conceived Bildung as an endless process of self-development through an interplay with the world in which the individual elevates themself beyond the existing stage of culture (Humboldt, Reference Humboldt2022 [1793]; Masschelein & Ricken, Reference Masschelein and Ricken2005). In Humboldt’s view, its aim was the “highest and most proportional” development of human powers through “the most general, most animated, and most unrestrained interplay” (Brinkmann, Reference Brinkmann2019; Humboldt, Reference Humboldt2022). Bildung should therefore “grasp as much of the world as possible,” with the world encompassing “every conceivable diversity” (Brinkmann, Reference Brinkmann2019; Humboldt, Reference Humboldt2022). It is thus a journey of leaving the familiar, encountering the foreign, and returning transformed, with a broader horizon and a renewed self (Gustavsson, Reference Gustavsson2017; Varkøy, 2010). In this view, it is the very otherness of the other that enables Bildung’s formative interplay (Brinkmann, Reference Brinkmann2019).
Humboldt’s modern concept of Bildung emphasises a strict distinction between self-Bildung and the external world, suggesting that the self is normatively cut off from its surroundings. For Humboldt, Bildung occurs through the interplay of self and world, yet always through the self-activity of the individual (Humboldt, Reference Humboldt2022). This means Bildung is not mere socialisation or indoctrination but an active process of self-development, in which the self engages with the world’s diversity to elevate its powers. Consequently, the world (particularly nature) is rendered significant primarily as a means to human self-development. It becomes a passive matter, a background or training object for self-Bildung. The advantage of this view is that it can liberate education and learners from societal norms, socialisation, totalitarian regimes, and external pressures, offering critical resources for education. At the same time, however, it reduces the world to an object of use. Humanity is hypostasised as the sole intrinsic value, echoing a colonialist perspective that legitimises exploitation and positions humanity, specifically the free and rational individual, as the highest context, with the world as a mere backdrop (Blenkinsop & Wilhelmsson, Reference Blenkinsop and Wilhelmsson2024; Paulsen, Reference Paulsen, Kergel, Paulsen, Garsdal and Heidkamp-Kergel2022b; Taylor, Reference Taylor2017).
Early Klafki and categorial Bildung
Klafki carried forward Humboldt’s human-centred and scenic worldview (Paulsen, Reference Paulsen, Petersen, von Brömssen, Jacobsen, Garsdal, Paulsen and Koefoed2022c). Klafki’s framework has become one of the most influential interpretations of Bildung in Northern Europe, particularly in relation to school curricula and teacher education (Petersen et al., Reference Petersen, Brömssen, Jacobsen, Garsdal, Paulsen and Koefoed2022). Building on Humboldt, he develops what is now known as the critical-constructive tradition of Bildung, translating Humboldt’s philosophical orientation into a pedagogical theory concerned with democracy, self-determination, and social justice. In the 1950s and 1960s, Klafki developed the theory of categorial Bildung (1983 [1963]), inspired by hermeneutics and the classical tradition. He argued that Bildung had been divided between formal theories, which emphasised the learner’s powers while reducing content to training material, and material theories, which prescribed specific content for becoming ein gebildeter Mensch. Each, he claimed, was one-sided. Bildung must unite both: developing human powers while engaging with important aspects of the world. Categorial Bildung thus called on schools to select fundamental or exemplary content that simultaneously develops students’ capacities and opens the world to them, while encouraging students to open themselves to the world. This placed Klafki in line with Humboldt, affirming Bildung as a free interplay between student and world, aimed at human self-development. Yet his theory remained anthropocentric, treating the world as a stage for human growth, and not for instance as engaging with, in, and for the more-than-human world, in what Scheler (Reference Scheler1992) called a communicative approach to knowledge.
Late Klafki and critical-constructive Bildung didactics
From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, Klafki developed his theory of critical-constructive Bildung didactics in response to critiques that his earlier work was too conservative and insufficiently critical (Klafki, Reference Klafki1995; Klafki, 2001 [1991]). Drawing on critical theory, he proposed a framework combining hermeneutics with ideology critique (Klafki, Reference Klafki and Uljens1997), giving education a stronger societal orientation concerned with democracy, inequality, and student motivation (Arfwedson, Reference Arfwedson1998; Blanketz, Reference Blanketz1985; Eriksson, Reference Eriksson2019). Klafki’s most influential idea was that students should engage with “epochal key problems” relevant to all humanity, such as peace, the environment, social injustice, technology, and human sexuality (Klafki, 2001; Kvamme, Reference Kvamme2021; Paulsen, Reference Paulsen, Petersen, von Brömssen, Jacobsen, Garsdal, Paulsen and Koefoed2022c; Sjöström & Eilks, Reference Sjöström, Eilks, Akpan and Kennedy2020). By doing so, they would learn to think and act critically from a general humanistic perspective. Yet these key problems are addressed only from an anthropocentric perspective. Klafki also assumes that consensus can be reached through a worldview of human exceptionalismFootnote 2 and treats the environment as one among many exemplary problems. From an ecological perspective, however, no problem is environment-free (Orr, Reference Orr1992). Had Klafki framed Bildung in relation to the life zone in which all species exist, the highest context would not be humanity in abstraction from the world but the living world itself (Paulsen, Reference Paulsen, Petersen, von Brömssen, Jacobsen, Garsdal, Paulsen and Koefoed2022a).
Summing up the critical assessment of the modern Humboldt Klafki Bildung tradition
There are both advantages and disadvantages to drawing on the Humboldt–Klafki Bildung tradition in addressing today’s eco-crisis. Humboldt’s theory highlights that human powers and knowledge should be developed through as free an interplay with the world as possible. This could include creatively engaging with eco-solutions informed by knowledge of ecosystems, climate change, and human impacts. Accordingly, students should be encouraged to develop such powers and knowledge through diverse encounters with cultural, scientific, and temporal perspectives on environmental problems, aiming at broad horizons rather than socialisation or indoctrination into prescribed eco-behaviours. Teaching practices in this sense should be explorative, experimental, open-ended, and transdisciplinary. As Klafki emphasised, educational institutions should carefully select content that is both formative and significant. In his later work, this selection was linked to epochal key problems, including environmental challenges, which he framed as central to humanity as a whole. This critical-constructive perspective aligns with similar currents in ESE, most notably the action competence approach (Jensen & Schnack, Reference Jensen and Schnack1997), which is explicitly rooted in the critical Bildung tradition and seeks to foster critical, reflective, and action-oriented capacities rather than predetermined behaviours. Comparable arguments have been made in the ESE literature that emphasise the need for open, critical, pluralistic and democratic forms of environmental education (e.g. Hart, Reference Hart2024; Kopnina & Cherniak, Reference Kopnina and Cherniak2016; Mogensen & Schnack, Reference Mogensen and Schnack2010; Peters, Reference Peters2017; Tryggvason et al., Reference Tryggvason, Öhman and Van Poeck2023; Wals, Reference Wals2010). Nevertheless, significant deficits remain: Humboldt’s conceptualisation positions nature as a passive training object, encouraging human knowledge about the world but not co-development with the world and its other-than-human inhabitants. Early Klafki focused on cultural content but neglected the ecological and socio-material context of Bildung. Late Klafki acknowledged environmental issues as epochal key problems yet framed them as human concerns, with humanity as the highest context (Paulsen, Reference Paulsen, Petersen, von Brömssen, Jacobsen, Garsdal, Paulsen and Koefoed2022c). This anthropocentric framing risks narrowing Bildung’s normative horizon to what benefits humanity alone, rather than the broader living world on which human life depends. Such limitations echo long-standing critiques within ESE of anthropocentrism and point towards the need for more relational and ecocentric approaches (Blenkinsop & Wilhelmsson, Reference Blenkinsop and Wilhelmsson2025; Bonnett, Reference Bonnett2002; Gough, Reference Gough, Stevenson, Brody, Dillon and Wals2013; Jickling & Wals, Reference Jickling and Wals2008).
Nature as Co-Teacher: Inspiration from the Wild Pedagogies tradition
The WP tradition emerged in 2014 and has since developed through recurring gatherings and an international network (Blenkinsop & Wilhelmsson, Reference Blenkinsop and Wilhelmsson2024; Jickling et al., Reference Jickling, Blenkinsop, Timmerman and De Danann Sitka-Sage2018). It rests on two core assumptions: first, that what it means to be human in a more-than-human world must be renegotiated, rejecting anthropocentrism and recognising all beings as mutually implicated (Abraham, Reference Abram2012; Blenkinsop & Kuchta, Reference Blenkinsop and Kuchta2024) and second, that education is a key partner in enabling eco-social–cultural change (Blenkinsop et al., Reference Blenkinsop, Morse, Jickling, Paulsen, Jagodzinsk and Hawke2022). This orientation resonates with broader debates on relational, ecocentric, and more-than-human pedagogies (Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Reference Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2023).
More specifically, WP engages the notion of wilderness to counter narrow ideals of control and affirm the agency and intrinsic value of the more-than-human world in the Anthropocene (Jickling et al., Reference Jickling, Blenkinsop, Timmerman and De Danann Sitka-Sage2018). Wilderness here refers not to an untouched “elsewhere,” but to self-willed land where beings pursue their own ends (Morse et al., Reference Morse, Jickling and Quay2018). This perspective seeks to amplify more-than-human voices while remaining attentive to critiques of essentialism and colonialism (Blenkinsop et al., Reference Blenkinsop, Affifi, Piersol and De Danann Sitka-Sage2016; Jickling & Blenkinsop, Reference Jickling and Blenkinsop2020). Revaluing wildness therefore entails rethinking education by promoting pedagogies that disrupt conventional practices, nurture vitality in diverse contexts, and foster alternative ways of being (Blenkinsop et al., Reference Blenkinsop, Jickling, Morse, Jensen, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Malone and Barratt Hacking2018; Morse et al., Reference Morse, Jickling and Quay2018). WP thus functions less as a fixed model than as a heuristic and critical orientation that can be taken up differently across cultural and contextual settings.
A central WP touchstone is Nature as Co-Teacher, described as an invitation to take the living world seriously as an active, agential participant in education (Blenkinsop et al., Reference Blenkinsop, Morse, Jickling, Paulsen, Jagodzinsk and Hawke2022). Education becomes richer when the natural world is engaged with, listened to, and recognised as a source of knowledge. Embracing Nature as Co-Teacher decentres the human educator and reframes teaching as a shared, ongoing process unfolding within the more-than-human world. Practically, it invites educators to consider how they might create space for the natural world to be present as a Co-Teacher in pedagogical practice. Thus, Jickling et al. (Reference Jickling, Blenkinsop, Timmerman and De Danann Sitka-Sage2018, 80) write:
“This touchstone reminds educators to acknowledge, and then act, on the idea that those teachers capable of working with, caring for, and challenging student learning include more-than-human beings. This implies more than simply learning from the natural world; it includes learning with and through it as well; and thus, its myriad beings become active, fellow pedagogues. We acknowledge that this can be a challenge for educators ‘marinated’ in modernist worldview. Yet, we recognize that there can be tremendous benefits to questioning the idea that a single human teacher should be at the centre of teaching and learning, and to expand consideration of what and who an educator is and might be.”
As this passage indicates, Nature as Co-Teacher invites human educators to decentre themselves and recognise more-than-human beings as fellow pedagogues, not only to learn from, but also with and through. At the same time, the proponents acknowledge that this challenges dominant modernist assumptions about education and may therefore be difficult for educators shaped by such perspectives. Jickling et al. (Reference Jickling, Blenkinsop, Timmerman and De Danann Sitka-Sage2018, 81) continue:
“In seeking to teach with nature, educators become open and available to the range of facts, knowings, and understandings that place have to offer. Such attention involves carefully listening to available voices and building partnerships.”
Nature as Co-Teacher can therefore be understood as an invitation to listen to more-than-human voices, for example, what an oak tree might “say” or what might be learned by attending to the ocean. It calls for building relationships of care and concern with more-than-human beings and with specific places and their inhabitants. Where mainstream modern education often emphasises abstract knowledge about the world, Nature as Co-Teacher invites engagement and cultivating relational knowledge emerging from attentive encounters with particular environments in non-hierarchical ways.
Proponents of Nature as Co-Teacher also emphasise the limits of human understanding of more-than-human beings and their interactions. Jickling et al. (Reference Jickling, Blenkinsop, Timmerman and De Danann Sitka-Sage2018, 83) therefore conclude:
“It is important to be aware that the natural world is not simply an educational opportunity arranged for human beings; it is not there just to be picked through by the thoughtful human teacher for the sole benefit of a particular group of students. This awareness requires humility on the part of the human educator.”
Awareness of the limits of human knowledge, together with humility and a commitment to non-hierarchical relations, thus forms an integral part of the Nature as Co-Teacher touchstone. It is this specific touchstone, with its associated nuances, that we focus on in this article to reconsider the assumptions of the Humboldt–Klafki tradition.
The Enaforsholm Wild Pedagogies gathering to think Nature as Co-Teacher with
To deepen how the concept of Nature as Co-Teacher might be helpful in rewilding the critical-constructive Bildung tradition and its assumptions about self–world relationships, we now turn to and draw on reflections generated at a WP gathering held in August 2023 at Enaforsholm, Sweden, which we co-organised. Participants were invited to consider four didactical questions: What does Nature as Co-Teacher mean? Why should we? How could we? Where could we? Beyond these prompts, the gathering sought to challenge conventional approaches to conferences, collaboration, scholarship, voice, and pedagogy by questioning control, standardisation, and conformity. Thus, the gathering fostered reflection on Nature as Co-Teacher while simultaneously experimenting with activities conducted mainly outdoors to explore relationships with the land and the more-than-human world. Thirty-four participants from twelve nations joined, bringing diverse cultural perspectives. Over five days, they held workshops centred on Nature as Co-Teacher. Place was acknowledged as significant: Enaforsholm lies in the South Sami area of Jämtland, home to an Indigenous people whose traditional livelihoods in hunting, fishing, and reindeer herding are today challenged by tourism and wind energy development. Many Sami also combine small-scale tourism, craftsmanship, or urban work. For one whole-day event, a reindeer-herding woman shared traditional Jojk with half the participants, while the others engaged in art with a Sami couple from a city on Sweden’s east coast.
Throughout the week, participants noted reflections on Post-it notes linked to the four main questions. On the last day, participants collectively themed these reflections. The summarised results are presented below as four mosaics (inspired by Hacking et al., Reference Hacking, Bastos, Hogarth, Sands, Dunkley, Wenham, Saputra, McCabe, Fletcher, Nashid, Anjani and Davies2023), intended to encapsulate diverse responses while leaving space for tensions, overlaps, and further mosaics. Mosaicking can be understood as an experimental way of assembling heterogeneous fragments, ideas, experiences, reflections, and encounters, without seeking to reduce them to a single coherent account. Rather than representing a unified view, each mosaic holds together multiple perspectives and material moments, allowing relations, contrasts, and unexpected connections to emerge. The approach also makes clear that other mosaics might be added, while others might be removed, thereby changing the overall picture and how each mosaic is understood. The four mosaics should therefore not be understood as final, but as reflecting the gathering’s pragmatic focus on the four didactical questions guiding the exploration of Nature as Co-Teacher. This approach resonates with the heuristic character of Nature as Co-Teacher itself, as it invites attention to situated encounters with the more-than-human world and to the relational processes through which meaning and learning unfold. Thus, the aim of mosaicking is not to represent the gathering in toto, or to account empirically for it, but to draw out diverse reflections to think with. In other words, we use these mosaics to nuance and detail how specific insights focused on didactical questions from the gathering have deepened the understanding of the concept in relation to rethinking Bildung inspired by an abductive approach (Wilhelmsson & Damber, Reference Wilhelmsson and Damber2023).
Nuances in the concept of Nature as Co-Teacher
The first mosaic (Figure 1) synthesises reflections from the gathering in response to the question: What does Nature as Co-Teacher mean? As outlined in the previous section, the concept invites educators to take the living world seriously as an active and agential participant in education, rather than treating nature merely as a context for human learning. The reflections gathered at Enaforsholm elaborate and nuance this idea. Participants described Nature as Co-Teacher as an invitation to let the living world, with its many voices, actively shape the educational process rather than remain a passive background or inanimate matter, thereby reframing how self–world relations in education may be understood. More importantly, it points to how the more-than-human world can take on multiple roles, such as helping us rediscover inner wildness and vitality while also offering critique from more-than-human perspectives. Instead of being largely excluded, as in much classroom teaching, students and other human learners are invited to engage with and in the more-than-human world (if and when it offers itself), within particular places rather than only learning about them. These reflections also bring out nuances that are less explicit in the theoretical articulation of the touchstone. In particular, participants emphasised how Nature as Co-Teacher may open pedagogical encounters to critique and political dimensions, invite attention to humans as part of the more-than-human world, and specifically how acknowledging place can foreground the situated and relational character of learning. At the same time, the reflections reinforce theoretical emphases on listening to more-than-human voices and recognising limits to human knowing when engaging with the living world. In this sense, the reflections resonate with arguments that underscore how Nature as Co-Teacher invites not only reflection but the enactment of different relational possibilities in education (Beeman & Blenkinsop, Reference Beeman and Blenkinsop2025).
What does Nature as Co-Teacher mean?
Figure 1. Long description
A hexagonal diagram featuring images and text related to the concept of nature as a co-teacher. The hexagons contain images of a colorful flag, notes on a tree, people interacting with nature, and a rural landscape. Text within the hexagons includes phrases like ‘Respecting more-than-humans, letting their voices be heard,’ ‘Gifting reflections - acknowledging the place, being in this unique situation,’ ‘Honouring multiple more-than-human knowings and accepting non-knowing,’ and ‘Opening for critique and political dimensions.’
The second mosaic (Figure 2) synthesises reflections on the question: Why Nature as Co-Teacher? From this perspective, engaging with the touchstone is seen as a way of countering the status quo, and thus creating disruptions and micro-revolutions in which life-appreciative ways of being are explored and made visible in education. It challenges modernist and colonial framings of education and opens possibilities for nurturing life-sensitive and life-supportive relationships with the Earth, grounded in concrete places. Such an orientation resonates more with the cosmologies and practices of Indigenous and colonised peoples, and less with narrow Western perspectives (see also for example Hankin & Hogarth, Reference Hankin and Hogarth2025, 279). In sum, Nature as Co-Teacher is conceptually tied to a project of educating for mutually beneficial flourishing, including engaging for nature.
Why Nature as Co-Teacher?
Figure 2. Long description
A hexagonal diagram featuring images and text related to nature as a co-teacher. The images include a person touching a tree, a group of people sitting outdoors, a person waving, and a colorful fabric hanging from a tree. The text in the hexagons discusses changing attitudes towards life, mutual flourishing, disrupting the status quo, reducing eco-socio-cultural injustice, understanding relationality, and rewilding domesticated societies.
The third mosaic (Figure 3) synthesises reflections on the question: How can Nature be a Co-Teacher? Participants suggested that this requires activities that encourage students to listen to the multiple voices of the living world, engage their whole bodies, collaborate with humans and more-than-humans, and practise care for other beings and for place. In this way, teaching can take place with and in nature, not only be about it. Such practices contrast with mainstream bureaucratic education, often confined to classrooms, where nature is reduced to an object of study. Specifically, participants highlighted the values of openness and unknowingness. This emphasis on embodied, multisensory engagement and practices of care also aligns with recent WP research showing how young children’s agency, aesthetic responsiveness, and ethical relations with place emerge through reciprocal interactions with more-than-human Co-Teachers (Beattie et al., Reference Beattie, Scott and Adler2025), as well as work highlighting the importance of embodied and experiential encounters for unsettling conventional classroom learning (van Tol & Wals, Reference van Tol and Wals2025).
How can Nature be a Co-Teacher?
Figure 3. Long description
The image presents a hexagonal diagram outlining key principles of environmental and sustainability education. Each hexagon contains text describing a principle, such as ‘Plenty of time to be, reflect, collaborate with and listen to nature’ and ‘Use bodily active formats, education that speaks to the whole body.’ Accompanying each principle are images of people engaging with nature: one shows individuals observing a bird, another depicts people sitting on a log in a forest, and a third shows a person holding a plant. The images emphasize hands-on, experiential learning and connection with the natural world.
The fourth mosaic (Figure 4) synthesises reflections on the question: Where could Nature be a Co-Teacher? Participants suggested that the concept invites deeper connections to the specific places where education occurs, recognising how places and the more-than-human world can be cared for and play an active role in teaching. Some places are fuller of life than others; places drained of vitality and self-will may need to be regenerated or rewilded as part of the educational process. Such restoration can itself become teaching, inspired by Nature as Co-Teacher. The guiding point is that educators should seek out the most vibrant places available or work to make the places they are in more vibrant by caring for the conditions of life there. Importantly, this vibrancy is not limited to remote or wild landscapes but can be found and cultivated within urban, everyday, and human-shaped places where most education unfolds. This attention to the vibrancy and agency of place also resonates with work emphasising that more-than-human agency can be enacted through situated, outdoor, and practice-based encounters that invite educators to recognise place as an active participant in pedagogical processes (Smallwood, Reference Smallwood2025). Thus, making place itself a central and critical element of the educational process.
Where could Nature be a Co-Teacher?
Figure 4. Long description
A hexagonal diagram featuring images and text that explore the concept of nature as a co-teacher. The images depict various outdoor scenes, including a group of people, a waterfall, a stream, and sheep grazing in a field. The text within the hexagons describes nature as vibrant places with rich and divergent ecology, outdoor and unpredictable settings where surprises occur, everywhere where life exists including places in need of regeneration, and place and site-specific connections to care for.
Reimagining the Humboldt-Klafki Bildung tradition with Nature as Co-Teacher
With these nuances of the concept of Nature as Co-Teacher in mind, we now turn to the central aim of this article: to ask whether the Humboldt–Klafki tradition can be rewilded so that it remains alive and relevant today by reframing the self–world relationship through the concept of Nature as Co-Teacher. This question follows from the concerns raised at the beginning of the article, namely that modern educational traditions, including the Bildung tradition, have largely developed within anthropocentric assumptions about the relationship between humans and the world. As discussed earlier, the critical-constructive Bildung tradition remains influential and normatively powerful in many educational contexts, yet it also tends to conceptualise the self–world relationship primarily in human-centred terms. Engaging the concept of Nature as Co-Teacher from the WP tradition offers a way to explore how this tradition might be reinterpreted where the more-than-human world explicitly becomes a participant within education as a whole. In doing so, we take up an inter- and cross-cultural endeavour that brings the Bildung tradition into dialogue with insights emerging from the WP context.
Our purpose in presenting the four mosaics on Nature as Co-Teacher has aimed to sketch a sufficiently rich place-based image that allows us to think with the concept generatively. We recognise that much more could be said, including critical remarks and objections, but pursuing those debates would take us too far from our main goal: to use the concept to rethink and nuance core assumptions in the critical-constructive Bildung tradition.
In what follows, we explore three directions. First, we integrate the elaborated nuances of Nature as Co-Teacher into Humboldt’s idea of Bildung as self-development through the freest possible interplay of self and world, considering what this integration implies. Second, inspired by our critical assessment of early Klafki, we develop the idea of more-than-human categorial Bildung in dialogue with the mosaics. Third, we return to late Klafki’s notion of epochal key problems and ask, inspired by the emphasis on place immanent in the idea of Nature as Co-Teacher, how their highest context might be reframed to include place with its multiple more-than-human voices.
Re-Imagination 1: Disrupting the modern self-world relationship
Humboldt describes Bildung as human self-development through the freest possible interplay between self and world where encounters with the world, including nature, are central to education because they provide the field through which human capacities are cultivated. Yet, even while Humboldt emphasised the richness of the world and the importance of encountering such: the world primarily functions as the domain rather than as an active participant.
The concept of Nature as Co-Teacher invites us to reconsider this assumption. As discussed in the previous sections, the touchstone proposes that the living world should be taken seriously as an active and agential participant in educational processes (Blenkinsop et al., Reference Blenkinsop, Morse, Jickling, Paulsen, Jagodzinsk and Hawke2022; Jickling et al., Reference Jickling, Blenkinsop, Timmerman and De Danann Sitka-Sage2018). The nuances concerning the didactical questions from the Enaforsholm gathering further emphasised attentiveness to more-than-human voices, engagement with particular places, and humility regarding the limits of human knowledge when learning with the living world. These insights suggest that the world cannot simply be understood as a context or resource for human formation. When brought into dialogue with Humboldt’s formulation, the meaning of the “interplay between self and world” begins to shift. Rather than understanding Bildung primarily as human self-development through encounters with the world, the relationship may be reinterpreted as one in which the living world also participates in shaping educational processes and in which the relationship itself becomes the main focus of Bildung.
Seen from this perspective, Humboldt’s idea of Bildung as human self-development through the freest possible interplay between self and world can be reimagined as Bildung as a process of dialogical co-development in a more-than-human world, unfolding through the freest possible interplay between humans and more-than-human beings. In such a reinterpretation, freedom is not assumed to lie solely on the human side of the relationship. The educational encounter takes place within a living world where all beings pursue their own forms of existence and can influence the direction of learning. In this sense, Bildung no longer refers primarily to the cultivation of human capacities through the world, but to processes of co-development that emerge through relationships.
Such a shift also opens an educational space for critique. If the world is approached not as passive matter or as a training ground for human development but as a living zone inhabited alongside myriad other beings, educational encounters may prompt reflection on how humans relate to those beings and places. In this sense, the concept of Nature as Co-Teacher suggests that Bildung can involve learning to attend to, respond to, and take responsibility within these relationships. As such this also nuances the political dimension in education and can nurture eco-democratic commitments such as voice, consent, self-determination and kindness (Blenkinsop & Wilhelmsson, Reference Blenkinsop and Wilhelmsson2025).
This reinterpretation does not abandon Humboldt’s central insight that Bildung unfolds through encounters between self and world, but expands what counts as “world” within this relationship. When the world is understood as a dynamic, living community of human and more-than-human beings, Bildung are emerging through relationships within a shared place. In this way, the concept of Nature as Co-Teacher offers a way to re-imagine Humboldt’s formulation so that the self–world relationship at the centre of Bildung includes the presence, agency, and voices of the more-than-human world.
Re-Imagination 2: More-than-human categorial Bildung
Early Klafki proposed the idea of categorial Bildung to bridge the gap between formal theories, which emphasise the self-development of human powers, and material theories, which prescribe knowledge about the world. His idea was that selected topics should simultaneously develop human powers and foster knowledge of the world. In this formulation, educational content is chosen so that it both cultivates the learner’s capacities and opens the world to them, while the learner opens themselves to the world. Yet, even as Klafki sought to overcome the one-sidedness of formal and material Bildung: the world primarily functions as that which is to be known and appropriated, and the selection of content remains a human-centred pedagogical decision.
The concept of Nature as Co-Teacher invites us to reconsider this assumption. If the living world is understood as an active and agential participant in educational processes (Blenkinsop et al., Reference Blenkinsop, Morse, Jickling, Paulsen, Jagodzinsk and Hawke2022; Jickling et al., Reference Jickling, Blenkinsop, Timmerman and De Danann Sitka-Sage2018), and if, as emphasised in the mosaics, more-than-human beings and places may offer direction, resistance, and critique, then what becomes educationally significant are no longer determined solely in advance by human teachers. The question of content selection is thus displaced: which topics and interests matter from the perspective of place and its living beings? What might become educationally significant when attentiveness is directed towards more-than-human voices?
Seen from this perspective, Klafki’s idea of categorial Bildung can be reimagined by shifting the basis on which categories emerge. Rather than being selected primarily for their exemplary value in developing human capacities and knowledge about the world, categories emerge through concrete encounters with living beings in specific places. In line with the mosaics’ focus on attentiveness, care, and embodied engagement, educational content becomes something that arises relationally within situated encounters.
This shift also transforms the relation between formal and material Bildung. Rather than balancing the development of human powers (formal) with knowledge about the world (material), engagement with and in nature foregrounds the vibrancy of place itself. The world is no longer a tool for human development but an equal communicative partner. In this sense, students are not only encouraged to acquire knowledge about the world, but also, and first of all, to cultivate their own capacities to engage with the world through attentiveness, care, and critique, grounded in lived experiences with(in) place. This resonates with calls within ESE for more relational and participatory approaches that move beyond learning about the environment towards learning with and within it (Jickling & Wals, Reference Jickling and Wals2008; Wals, Reference Wals2010).
A similar transformation occurs in the understanding of categories themselves. Rather than being treated as universal, abstract, and transferable across contexts, categories can be understood as concrete and place-specific. As suggested in the mosaics, where place is foregrounded as a central participant in educational processes, categories such as “oak trees,” “rivers,” or “weather” are not only generalisable objects of knowledge but lived relations that invite personal, emotional, and ethical engagement. This shift aligns with broader posthuman and relational perspectives in ESE that emphasise situated, embodied, and more-than-human forms of knowing (Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Reference Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2023). This does not exclude learning about oak trees as such but situates such knowledge within the concrete relation with places.
Finally, Klafki’s idea of a “double opening” can be reinterpreted. If, as the touchstone suggests, more-than-human beings are to be recognised as fellow pedagogues (Blenkinsop et al., Reference Blenkinsop, Morse, Jickling, Paulsen, Jagodzinsk and Hawke2022), and if the mosaics emphasise listening to multiple more-than-human voices and remaining open to what cannot be fully known, then the “opening” becomes a dialogical process in which students open themselves within a more-than-human world, while the living world also “open” to them in reciprocal ways.
In sum, and inspired by Nature as Co-Teacher, we suggest a more-than-human rethinking of Klafkian categorial Bildung. Here, Bildung involves:
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1. focusing on topics or categories that emerge as relevant within concrete encounters with living beings in specific places,
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2. embedding both knowledge about the world and the development of capacities within living relationships in a more-than-human world, and
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3. opening the world to students and students to the world through engagement with life-essential questions arising from encounters in place.
Concretely, this can involve paying attention to the ants, the oaks, the plants, or other living categories, such as rivers and weather, in a specific place as the ultimate content. What does it mean to nurture relations built on concern, curiosity, and asking how to understand the world, the interests, and the freedom of the oak trees? And likewise with attentiveness to how other beings also are changing and learning?
Re-Imagination 3: The living world as the highest context
Nature as Co-Teacher also suggests modifications to Klafki’s later work and its normative context. As noted, late Klafki argued that students should engage with epochal key problems within the horizon of humanity, that is, problems affecting all humans. Students were thus encouraged to explore solutions from the standpoint of humanity. In this formulation, humanity functions as the highest normative context within which educational questions are framed.
Yet, when viewed through the lens of Nature as Co-Teacher, this horizon becomes unsettled. If the living world is understood as an active and agential participant in educational processes (Blenkinsop et al., Reference Blenkinsop, Morse, Jickling, Paulsen, Jagodzinsk and Hawke2022; Jickling et al., Reference Jickling, Blenkinsop, Timmerman and De Danann Sitka-Sage2018), and if, as emphasised in the mosaics, more-than-human beings and places may offer perspectives, critique, and forms of participation beyond humans then humanity can no longer be taken as the sole or highest frame of reference. Rather, the concrete, place-bound living world and the possibility of mutually beneficial flourishing emerge as a broader normative horizon. Seen from this perspective, Klafki’s idea of epochal key problems can be reimagined by expanding the context as within the shared living world in which humans and more-than-human beings coexist. Solidarity thus extends not only to humans but also to more-than-humans, with attention to eco-social–cultural injustices across species. In this way, Nature as Co-Teacher invites educators to support students in imagining responses and responsibilities in relation to the concrete living world in which they are situated, together with a multiplicity of other beings.
This shift also transforms how problems themselves are understood. More-than-human participants, such as trees, ants, and other beings, can be approached as having their own forms of existence, significance and strivings. Questions may therefore be asked how different actions might affect other beings: whether human or more-than-human. What might matter from multiple different perspectives? How might sayings and responses be imagined in ways that take presence and conditions of life seriously?
From this perspective, environmental issues are not one epochal key problem among others, as in Klafki’s formulation, but the ground of all such problems. There are no “environment-free” issues; all problems unfold within the shared life zone that sustains every form of life (Latour, Reference Latour2017; Lin, Reference Lin2010; Orr, Reference Orr1992; Paulsen, Reference Paulsen, Petersen, von Brömssen, Jacobsen, Garsdal, Paulsen and Koefoed2022a). This resonates with broader arguments in ESE that emphasise the inseparability of social, cultural, and ecological concerns (Jickling & Wals, Reference Jickling and Wals2008; Wals, Reference Wals2010).
Consider Klafki’s example of peace. Peace is not only a human problem of war between people; wars also affect more-than-human beings and the conditions of life more broadly. Conflicts also occur between humans and more-than-humans. More deeply, peace may be understood as inseparable from the living world itself. Nature as Co-Teacher thus invites educators to engage students in reflecting on human conflicts, their ecological consequences, and what attentiveness to more-than-human presence might contribute to rethinking peace. How might a peaceful living world be imagined, sustained, and learned? What would different beings “say” to such a project?
In sum, our third re-imagination of critical-constructive Bildung involves a reconfiguration of the highest normative horizon. Rather than humanity in abstraction functioning as the highest context, Bildung is reoriented towards the concrete, place-bound living world and the possibility of mutually beneficial flourishing within it. We suggest that Klafki’s emphasis on working with epochal key problems as central to general Bildung, can be expanded by situating such problems within a more-than-human horizon. In the context of the Anthropocene, this implies that the highest context is humanity embedded within a shared, place-bound, more-than-human world.
Concretely, this reorients the kinds of questions educators might encourage students to explore. In relation to issues such as war and peace, students may not only examine how different responses affect human groups and interests but also explore together with more-than-human beings how responses affect the conditions of life more broadly. How might other beings be understood as part of these entangled situations? The aim is thus not to abandon Klafki’s project, but to reorient it so that epochal key problems are approached within a more-than-human, place-sensitive, and relationally grounded horizon of Bildung.
Concluding remarks: Reimagining Bildung with Nature as Co-Teacher
In this article, we have examined both the potentials and limitations of modern Western education by focusing on the Northern European critical-constructive Humboldt–Klafki Bildung tradition in the context of the ecological crisis. While this tradition offers important emancipatory and democratic resources, we have argued that it remains shaped by an anthropocentric and scenic worldview that limits how self–world relations can be understood educationally.
To address this tension, we have engaged the WP concept of Nature as Co-Teacher as a heuristic lens for rethinking these assumptions. Importantly, our aim has been to explore how this single concept can be used to critically rework and extend an already influential educational tradition. Rather than treating nature as a passive background for human development, the concept foregrounds the living world as an active and agential participant in educational processes. Thinking with this concept, theoretically and through the nuanced mosaics developed from the Enaforsholm gathering, has enabled us to reimagine the critical-constructive Bildung tradition in three interconnected ways.
First, we have reinterpreted Humboldt’s idea of Bildung as human self-development through the interplay between self and world as dialogical co-development in a more-than-human world. Here, the self–world relationship is no longer centred on human cultivation alone but understood as unfolding through relationships within a more-than-human world. Bildung thus shifts from a focus on developing human capacities through the world to processes of relational development in a shared living world.
Second, we have reworked Klafki’s concept of categorial Bildung by showing how educational content need not be determined solely by human teachers and predefined curricular considerations. Instead, what becomes educationally significant may emerge through situated encounters with more-than-human beings and places. In this reimagining, the distinction between formal and material Bildung is reconfigured: learning is no longer about balancing human capacities and knowledge about the world, but about engaging with the world through attentiveness, care, and critique in lived, place-specific relations. Categories are thus understood not only as abstract and transferable, but as concrete, living, and relational.
Third, we have reoriented Klafki’s notion of epochal key problems by expanding its normative horizon. Rather than humanity in abstraction functioning as the highest context, we have proposed the concrete, place-bound living world as the broader horizon within which such problems must be understood. This shift foregrounds that no problem is environment-free and invites educational engagement with issues such as peace, justice, and sustainability in ways that include more-than-human beings and the conditions of life of a concrete place. In this sense, Bildung becomes oriented towards mutually beneficial flourishing.
Taken together, these three re-imaginations show how engaging Nature as Co-Teacher does not simply align Bildung with WP but makes it possible to rework the internal logic of the Bildung tradition itself. In this way, the article contributes to ESE by offering a conceptual bridge between established Bildung thinking and emerging more-than-human pedagogical perspectives. The contribution of this article also shows how a historically influential pedagogical framework can be reinterpreted so that its core concern, the formation of self–world relations, can be extended while retaining its critical, democratic, and emancipatory ambitions. This is particularly important because Bildung continues to shape educational thinking and practice in many contexts; reworking it from within may therefore offer a more viable pathway for educational change.
At the same time, important questions remain. Is the concept of Nature as Co-Teacher radical enough to support a deeper rethinking of education in the Anthropocene? Does it sufficiently move beyond anthropocentrism, or does it risk reintroducing human-centred assumptions through notions such as “teacher” and “nature”? There is also a risk that educators may engage with more-than-human relations only temporarily, before returning to predominantly human-centred practices. Furthermore, dominant imaginaries of “wild” nature may obscure the vitality of everyday and urban environments where most education takes place. Such tensions point to the need for continued critical inquiry. In this article, we have not sought to resolve these questions, but to explore what the concept of Nature as Co-Teacher can do when brought into dialogue with the Humboldt–Klafki tradition. Our contribution is therefore not a final model, but a conceptual opening: a way of rethinking Bildung that invites further experimentation, critique, and development in relation to ecology, democracy, and education in a more-than-human world.
Acknowledgements
We appreciate the engagement from all participants in the gathering, human and more-than-human fellows, the support, care, and inspiration offered by the more-than-human world – nature-as-co-researcher.
Ethical statement
Nothing to note.
Financial support
This study received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors
Author Biographies
Linda Wilhelmsson, Senior Lecturer in Education at Mid Sweden University, holds a PhD in Education. Her dissertation focused on education and democracy, specifically student influence in teaching practices. She is the research leader for Critical Perspectives in Educational Research (KUF), coordinating an international research network, Eco-democracy and education. She engages with the WP network. A recent research project was on locally relevant education for sustainable development in sparsely populated areas. The Nordic Bildung-concept are part of her interest. Current research focuses on exploring and enacting Eco-Democracy in Educational Settings. Linda Wilhelmsson | miun.se
Michael Paulsen Associate Professor in Pedagogy and head of CUHRE (Centre for Understanding Human Relationship with the Environment), at the University of Southern Denmark. Author and editor of several books and special issues. He holds a PhD in Social Philosophy. Currently, he is working on a pedagogical theory of life-friendly education situated in the Anthropocene. See https://portal.findresearcher.sdu.dk/en/persons/mpaulsen
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